hrough more or less in its first (and very early) sexual
emotions. "If king OEdipus can deeply affect modern mankind no less than
the contemporary Greeks, the explanation can lie only in the fact that the
effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend on the antithesis between fate
and the human will, but in the peculiarity of the material in which this
antithesis is developed. There must be a voice in our inner life which is
ready to recognize the compelling power of fate in the case of OEdipus,
while we reject as arbitrary the situations in the Ahnfrau or other
destiny tragedies. And such an element is indeed contained in the history
of king OEdipus. His fate touches us only because it might have been ours,
because the oracle hung the same curse over us before our birth as over
him. For us all, probably, it is ordained that we should direct our first
sexual feelings towards our mothers, the first hate and wish for violence
against our fathers. Our dreams convince us of that. King OEdipus, who has
slain his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, is only the
wish-fulfillment of our childhood. But more fortunate than he, we have
been able, unless we have become psychoneurotic, to dissociate our sexual
feelings from our mothers and forget our jealousy of our fathers. From the
person in whom that childish wish has been fulfilled we recoil with the
entire force of the repressions, that these wishes have since that time
suffered in our inner soul. While the poet in his probing brings to light
the guilt of OEdipus, he calls to our attention our own inner life, in
which that impulse, though repressed, is always present. The antithesis
with which the chorus leaves us

See, that is OEdipus,
Who solved the great riddle and was peerless in power,
Whose fortune the townspeople all extolled and envied.
See into what a terrible flood of mishap he has sunk.

This admonition hits us and our pride, we who have become in our own
estimation, since the years of childhood, so wise and so mighty. Like
OEdipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that are so offensive to
morality, which nature has forced upon us, and after their disclosure we
should all like to turn away our gaze from the scenes of our childhood."
(Freud, Trdtg., p. 190 f.)

Believing that I have by this time sufficiently prepared the reader who
was unfamiliar with psychoanalysis for the psychoanalytic part of my
investigation, I will